FAO at the 2024 Arab Forum for Sustainable Development: A more equal and sustainable world? Chasing the promise of digital technologies

''Digitalization of Agrifood Systems, leveraging the digital capabilities and opportunities are critical to usher transformational impact for vulnerable populations in bridging the rural divide and empowering youth and women to access information, technology, and markets.

Data-driven agriculture promises opportunities of more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agrifood systems, positively affecting food markets and agricultural productivity to enhance food security.

FAO’s technical expertise and credibility as a knowledge and evidence-based organization enables it to translate the vision of digital agriculture into concrete action for Members and promote policy agendas to address the digital gap and “massify” digital benefits.

Linking nuclear and digital techniques for enhancing the use and conservation of soil and water resources is key to enhance agricultural productivity, resilience to climate change and remediation of environmental pollution. Joint FAO/International Atomic Energy Agency Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture develops best practices, such as using cosmic ray neutron sensor for soil moisture monitoring, linking cosmic ray neutron sensors and satellite imagery data and agricultural water management with the AquaCrop productivity model.

More collaboration is now expected between FAO and IAEA to make long-term real-time soil moisture and relevant observation data available on FAO’s Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform,  as well as on the GEO-AI challenge or benchmarking on soil moisture remote sensing inversion using the UN OpenGIS GEO-AI platform.

FAO is championing transformational changes and digital has now been fully incorporated into the organization’s Strategic Framework 2022-31, with the new Digital for Impact stream supporting policy-making, providing key information and connecting various stakeholders, but also providing digital tools to farmers - all in the context of accelerating progress towards the SDGs. 

FAO’s digital projects such as the 1000 Digital Village Initiative which is helping to bring digital services to rural communities enabling economic livelihoods and social cohesion. In making digital technologies more inclusive, it can support rural development and transform agrifood systems in low and middle income countries.

FAO together with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), has created the E-Agriculture Strategy Guide to assist countries in developing their national e-agriculture strategy. These strategies are helping to rationalize resources, generate new revenue streams and improve rural livelihoods. In addition, FAO has developed applications, platforms and databases to increase access to useful information, maps and statistics such as the Digital Services Portfolio."